Historians in Service of a Better South, new from NewSouth Books, has as its subtitle “Essays in Honor of Paul Gaston.” The book is a Festschrift, a collection of essays by Gaston’s students and colleagues over his long career at the University of Virginia and through his long-time involvement in civil rights causes. Robert Jefferson (Jeff) Norrell and Andrew Myers edited the book.

Gaston himself sent a video message to the contributors and to NewSouth, thanking them for what he called a “handsome book.”

Gaston joined the history department of the University of Virginia in 1957, teaching Southern and civil rights history until his retirement in 1997. His involvement in civil rights and social justice began with his role as a community organizer and participant in protest movements and sit-ins during the 1960s. At UVA he led student and faculty efforts to dismantle segregation. He served as research director of the Southern Regional Council; he was a member of the SRC’s executive committee from 1974-1998 and presidentfrom 1984-1988.

Books by Paul Gaston include The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award), Women of Fair Hope, Man and Mission: E. B. Gaston and the Origins of the Fairhope Single Tax Colony, and Coming of Age in Utopia: The Odyssey of an Idea, all published or returned to print by NewSouth Books. He also contributed essays to Where We Stand: Voices of Southern Dissent and Dixie Redux, itself a Festschrift to scholar Sheldon Hackney.

Contributors to Historians in Service of a Better South: Essays in Honor of Paul Gaston include Edward Ayers, Raymond Gavins, James Hershman, John T. Kneebone, Matthew Lassiter, Gregg Michel, Lynda J. Morgan, Stephen O’Neill, Robert Pratt, Steve Suitts, Randolph Werner, Myers, and Norrell.

Gaston called Historians in Service of a Better South “something that I never imagined I would have.” He said, “Thank you … for publishing a book that’s so important to me. I hope it will be important to others.”

Historians in Service of a Better South: Essays in Honor of Paul Gaston is available from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookstore.

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Richard Bailey, author of Neither Carpetbaggers Nor Scalawags: Black Officeholders During the Reconstruction of Alabama 1867-1878, honored the legacies of two influential African Americans recently.

In February he helped to unveil a portrait of Horace King, a former slave who became an architect and designed the distinctive spiral staircase of the Alabama Capitol building. According to the Montgomery Advertiser, King used bridge-building techniques to design the staircase so that a central support was not required. King later served two terms in the Alabama House of Representatives, from 1868-71. Bailey notes that this is the first portrait of an African American that will be on permanent display in the Capitol.

Bailey also helped to dedicate the gravesite of King in LaGrange, Georgia, at the Mulberry Street Cemeteries. He told the LaGrange News that King was “a man who did so much and asked for so little,” noting that the builder helped construct the bridge that connected Columbus, Georgia and Phoenix City, Alabama.

More recently Richard Bailey spoke at the funeral of Lillie Mae Bradford, who refused to move from the front section of a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested for disorderly conduct years before Rosa Parks. Bailey told the Montgomery Advertiser, “She wasn’t part of any movement, and that makes her action more outstanding.”

Neither Carpetbaggers Nor Scalawags is available from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookstore.

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Alabama Secretary of State John H. Merrill honored noted political commentator Steve Flowers with an award from the National Associations of Secretaries of State for Flowers’s work as a legislator and political columnist. The award recognizes people who have “contributed extensively to the elections process.”

Flowers was honored for his sixteen years of service in the Alabama State Legislature, during which he was voted the “Most Ethical Member of the House” (1988), the “Most Outstanding Freshman House Member” (1988), and the “Most Outstanding Member of the Alabama House of Representatives” (1992), and for his work as a writer and speaker. Flowers has addressed national audiences, and has a weekly column that is carried by over sixty Alabama newspapers. Flowers also hosts the television talk show “This Week in Alabama Politics.”

NewSouth published his book Of Goats & Governors: Six Decades of Colorful Alabama Political Stories in 2015. Steve continues to cross the state speaking about the antics of legendary Alabama governors George Wallace, “Big Jim” Folsom, and John Patterson, among others. His award is a tribute to his devotion to all things political in the state of Alabama. Congratulations, Steve!

Of Goats & Governors is available from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookstore.

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2017 is already proving to be a busier year than most for Alabama Poet Laureate Emeritus Sue Brannan Walker. January saw the publication of her imaginative long-form poem It’s Good Weather for Fudge: Conversing with Carson McCullers, with an introduction by McCullers scholar Carlos Dews, released to commemorate the 100th anniversary of McCullers’s birth on February 19.

Fittingly, the first official event for the new book was hosted by the Georgia Center for the Book — Columbus, Georgia being the birthplace of Ms. McCullers. Walker will present at the Alabama Writers Symposium and public libraries in Mobile and Demopolis, Alabama, traveling to New Orleans, New York City, Georgia again, and beyond for other events. A most-anticipated stop will be in Rome, Italy this coming summer, where she will be a featured presenter at the Carson McCullers Centenary Conference hosted by John Cabot University.

In addition to her activities recognizing the McCullers centenary, Walker wrote the script for a Eugene Walter Reader’s Theater program, which premiered last month to an SRO crowd in the new Hilton Garden Inn Eugene’s Monkey Bar & Grill in Mobile. Walker’s script was based on Walter’s short story, “The Byzantine Riddle.” Next month, a new book of Walker’s poetry, Let Us Imagine Her Name, is due out from Clemson University Press. Whew.

At the “Byzantine Riddle” premiere, writer Sue Brannan Walker (second from right) and performers (from left) Tom Mason, Carolyn Haines, Nancy Anlage,
and Jordan Noon.

It’s Good Weather for Fudge is available from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookstore.

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Writer, professor, and civil-rights activist Dr. Leslie W. Dunbar died January 4, 2017 in New Orleans, three weeks from his 96th birthday.

In the turmoil of the 1960s, Dunbar worked with the Southern Regional Council, helping — among other initiatives — to create the Voter Education Project; the project is credited with registering two million African American voters. Later that decade Dunbar directed the Field Foundation, dedicated to child welfare and civil rights, including funding Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign and the Children’s Defense Fund.

Dunbar also taught political science at a number of colleges and universities, and worked with the Ford Foundation. Even after “retirement,” he continued to be active in political and social justice causes. He is the author, editor, or contributor to at least nine books, including from NewSouth Books Where We Stand: Voices of Southern Dissent; American Crisis, Southern Solutions: From Where We Stand, Promise and Peril; and Looking for the Future: A Meditation on Political Choice. In summer 2016 NewSouth also published a collection of tribute essays, Leslie W. Dunbar: Reflections by Friends, that included a message from Congressman John Lewis among others.

Friends and family remember Leslie Dunbar, including his son, author Tony Dunbar.

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American Happiness has been selected as a finalist in the Seven Sisters Book Awards, which recognize talented female authors in seven categories. President Lynn Hinton notes that the awards celebrate the stories of women and the women who write them, and says she is excited about this second year of the awards program.

The award judges, however, aren’t alone in praising Trimble’s “grown-woman poetics,” a phrase we borrow from the outstanding blurb author Honoree Fanonne Jeffers contributed to the book. There are also the insightful comments that came to us from Jennifer Horne, another strong poet/writer. “Trimble’s grace,” she says, “is in the anger distilled to the bitter draft you savor as it bites, in thinking to ask whether Jean-Paul Sartre ever asked Simone de Beauvoir to go to the Winn-Dixie, in the fairy tales she rewrites and the myths of America she questions.” Amen, and may the best woman win.

And in related news, in a blog post on Poetry Foundation’s website, Cave Canem, perhaps our nation’s premier organization dedicated to supporting African American poets, asked its writer members to recall 20 years back, to the days of the founding of the group. Read the article by Tyehimba Jess and discover what Jacqueline Trimble had to say about Alice Walker . . . and the importance of washing dishes.

American Happiness is available from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookstore.

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In an interview with SIBA’s Lady Banks’ Commonplace Book newsletter, author Frye Gaillard talks about the craft of historical novelist. Gaillard’s new book for young readers, Go South to Freedom, relates an “as told to” slavery story, shared with him by an elderly neighbor.

The award-winning journalist and prolific author told Lady Banks that journalism always involves “writing somebody else’s story” and requires treating the material with care and respect. He describes the additional research into historical events and the people mentioned in the tale that he did in preparing to write Go South to Freedom. The research helped educate him about the so-called “Black Seminoles” and about the community of free blacks that lived in Mobile, Alabama many years before the Civil War. In the end, as he told Lady Banks, the most important aspect of a true story is to keep it alive.

Go South to Freedom is available from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookstore.

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NewSouth Books has enjoyed working the Osher Institute for Lifelong Learning in a partnership that has continued for seven years. OLLI is a program for learning in retirement for adults 50 and older. Members can choose from offerings that include academic courses as well as recreational and health activities.

Authors including Rev. Robert Graetz (A White Preacher’s Message on Race and Reconciliation), Warren Trest (Nobody But the People: The Life and Times of Alabama’s Youngest Governor), Rheta Grimsley Johnson (Hank Hung the Moon, Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming, Poor Man’s Provence), Frye Gaillard (Go South to Freedom, Journey to the Wilderness: War, Memory, and a Southern Family’s Civil War Letters, The Books that Mattered: A Reader’s Memoir, Watermelon Wine: The Spirit of Country Music), Kathryn Tucker Wyndham (She: The Old Woman Who Took Over My Life, Spit, Scarey Ann and Sweat Bees: One Thing Leads to Another, Alabama, One Big Front Porch, Jeffrey’s Favorite 13 Ghost Stories), Robert Baldwin (Life and Death Matters: Seeking the Truth About Capital Punishment), and Skip Tucker (Pale Blue Light) have given presentations at OLLI. The speakers unanimously praise the great interest and participation of audiences and the superb hosting of the OLLI staff.

Joining this list of illustrious presenters is Peter Huggins (In the Company of Owls), who will lead a workshop on writing poetry at the OLLI Writers Workshop at Pebble Hill on Thursday, October 13. Huggins is an Alabama State Council on the Arts poetry fellow. Other session leaders for the day include AU Professor Frank Walters on memoir writing; prolific children’s author and poet Charles Ghigna on writing for children; and award-winning short story author Carrie Spell on writing fiction.

Enrollment in the day-long program is limited to 40 participants with a cost of $25 for OLLI members and $50 for non-members; lunch is included.

If you haven’t discovered the pleasures of the OLLI experience, don’t delay in exploring the offerings at the OLLI closest to you.

NewSouth Books titles are available direct from our website or your favorite bookstore.

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William Heath (The Children Bob Moses Led) is the winner of the Spur Award for Best Western Historical Nonfiction for his new book William Wells and and the Struggle for the Old Northwest. The Spur Awards are given by the Western Writers of America. Heath’s is the first biography of William Well, a frontiersman born to Anglo parents and captured and raised by Miami Indians.

Heath has written on a variety of topics, with works of fiction, history, and poetry published. His novel The Children Bob Moses Led was named by Time magazine as one of the eleven best novels of the African American experience in 2002. The novel was recently republished by NewSouth Books.

Congratulations Bill on the Spur Award!

The Children Bob Moses Led is available from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookstore.

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One NewSouth author pays homage to another in the current issue of Alabama Heritage magazine. Faye Gibbons, author of the young adult novel Halley, penned a beautiful appreciation of Suzanne Pickett, whose memoir The Path Was Steep: A Memoir of Appalachian Coal Camps During the Great Depression was rereleased by NewSouth Books in 2013. Gibbons writes that though Pickett worked as a newspaper writer, “her memoir offers the most endearing insight into her life and the lives of others who survived during the Depression.”

Gibbons is no stranger to hard times herself, having grown up in a large Appalachian farm family and lived in mill towns in Georgia. Her article follows Suzanne Pickett from her birth in a mining family to her marriage to a miner, David Pickett. Struggling to survive the Depression, the family moved to follow jobs, and tried farming. Sue landed a newspaper job for a brief time that helped to supplement income. Even after her husband landed a more secure job, Pickett continued to write, producing plays for local students and short stories. She then went on to write the memoir that Gibbons says “captures the Depression in all its misery and shows how one family was able to endure hardships.” Adds Gibbons, “Even at a time when few women in her circumstances had literary ambitions, Suzanne Pickett was able to use words to create a compelling portrait of a formative time in our history.”

Suzanne Pickett

Halley and The Path Was Steep are available from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookstore.

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